It's appropriate that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died
at a luxury resort while freeloading as the guest of thus far unidentified
wealthy sponsors as one of 40 guests at a private quail-hunting vacation party.

The resort where he died, Cibolo Ranch Resort, located on land
stolen by its founder from the Apache and Comanche people in the Big Bend
region of west Texas, is a posh retreat favored by the ultra rich, offering
rooms priced from $350 to $800 a night -- and the bed
Scalia died in was the top-priced presidential suite, as he was the guest of honor. His credit card didn't need to be swiped when he checked in, since reportedly the guests at the gathering all had their bills covered by the resort's
owner, John Poindexter, a mullti-millionaire real estate owner, rancher and
former investment banker.)

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The acerbic, blunt-speaking Scalia made his name as a High Court
judge accepting freebies from wealthy businesspeople and right-wing outfits
like the Federalist Society, even taking free trips and vacation junkets from
the likes of the aptly-titled "Vice" President Dick Cheney back in 2004 when
Cheney had a case pending before the court involving an effort to force the VP
to disclose what oil company executives had attended a closed meeting in his
office on energy policy early in the first term of the Bush-Cheney
administration. (Scalia, notably, did not recuse himself from hearing that
case.)

We don't at this point know what Scalia's final junket was about
-- Poindexter makes a point of saying it "wasn't about politics or law" --
but it's no surprise he wasn't there on his own dime. That wasn't the way Scalia
operated. Indeed, so egregious and frequent were Scalia's junkets that in
October 2015 the New York
Times wrote an editorial condemning them and calling for a reform to make such
legalized bribery illegal.

Supreme Court justices, unlike members of Congress, don't need
to report such things as who takes them on luxury hunting trips. They are
simply required under a vague judicial ethics standard to recuse themselves when
they themselves feel they have a conflict of interest. Scalia made it
abundantly clear, during his record 30-year tenure on the Supreme Court bench,
that he did not feel getting freebies from the wealthy, affect his his judicial
judgement even when his benefactor had a case pending before him...

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of the collectively-owned, journalist-run online newspaper www.thiscantbehappening.net. He is a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books ("This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the (more...)